--- title: Everyone Read Kimi K3 as a Price War. It Is the Opposite. description: Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion parameter mixture-of-experts model that outperforms Claude Opus 4.8, but priced it at $3/$15 per million... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/everyone-read-kimi-k3-as-a-price-war-it-is-the-opposite--xshhpdjyb twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Everyone Read Kimi K3 as a Price War. It Is the Opposite. | daily.dev og:description: Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion parameter mixture-of-experts model that outperforms Claude Opus 4.8, but priced it at $3/$15 per million... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/everyone-read-kimi-k3-as-a-price-war-it-is-the-opposite--xshhpdjyb og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/XsHHPDjyb.png og:image:alt: Everyone Read Kimi K3 as a Price War. It Is the Opposite. og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Everyone Read Kimi K3 as a Price War. It Is the Opposite. **[Medium](https://daily.dev/sources/medium_js)** · 9 min read · 3 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion parameter mixture-of-experts model that outperforms Claude Opus 4.8, but priced it at $3/$15 per million input/output tokens — nearly 4x higher than its predecessor. Markets interpreted this as another DeepSeek-style price war and sold semiconductor stocks, but the author argues the opposite: Moonshot raised prices because serving a mandatory max-reasoning model is genuinely expensive, and cheaper per-unit intelligence drives more aggregate compute demand (Jevons paradox). Key limitations include no adjustable reasoning effort level, a suspicious 85-token hidden system prompt, and weights not yet released (promised July 27). The real story is capital efficiency — Moonshot sits above Google and Meta on capability leaderboards despite raising a fraction of their funding. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### How much does Kimi K3 cost compared to Kimi K2.6? Kimi K3 costs $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens, versus $0.95 and $4 for Kimi K2.6. That is roughly a 3.75x price increase, putting K3 in the same pricing tier as Anthropic's Sonnet line rather than undercutting Western models as many expected. _Developers weighing model costs against reasoning quality can track pricing shifts like this on daily.dev._ ### Why does Kimi K3 use so many output tokens compared to other models? Kimi K3 ships with only one reasoning effort level, set to maximum, with no dial to reduce it. Running a single SVG-generation prompt burned 16,658 output tokens, 13,241 of them reasoning tokens, costing about 25 cents for one image, since heavy reasoning consumes GPU-seconds regardless of task complexity. _Anyone choosing between reasoning-heavy and tunable models can follow real-world cost breakdowns like this on daily.dev._ ### When is Moonshot AI supposed to release the open weights for Kimi K3? Moonshot promised to release Kimi K3's weights by July 27, 2026, despite the model already being live on its API and in its products. Until that date, claims calling it the largest open-weight model ever released describe a press announcement rather than an actual downloadable model. _Teams planning around open-weight releases can watch how Kimi K3's weight drop unfolds on daily.dev._ --- Tags: [#llm](https://daily.dev/tags/llm), [#mixture-of-experts](https://daily.dev/tags/mixture-of-experts), [#kimi](https://daily.dev/tags/kimi), [#moonshot-ai](https://daily.dev/tags/moonshot-ai) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/everyone-read-kimi-k3-as-a-price-war-it-is-the-opposite--xshhpdjyb) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Everyone Read Kimi K3 as a Price War. 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